July 2022 Grocery Challenge

SausageDogSandwich

First spend of the month today, taken £2.12 off from what was left of June to make it £4.28 spent. I got 6 pints milk, 2 cucumbers, bag of potatoes, bag of apples and little one put some brioche in the basket, I didn’t want to say no as she has been poorly (again!!) and been brave (again!)  . I will need to get a few things from asd@ tomorrow as won’t have chance for a few days to go anywhere else. After that I am hoping not spend anymore money this week. 

atrixa

I'm up to £41.83/£145. Went to A!di today for a few bits, will try to go more often as the prices are reasonable compared to Mr M at the moment. They didn't have dried coriander though, will try to make it to an indie market this week to get a bigger bag of it.

The £stretcher near me is sadly closing- they were quite good for random non-perishables. I'm gutted that Trolley is closing down, too- that was critical in me choosing which supermarket to visit based on the price of their tofu.

Kaylataste

spent £62 today so £166/£240 left for the month.

goldfinches

@otb666 - very sorry to hear about your MIL but glad to hear you didn't have to see her suffer. Be kind to yourselves as you grieve.

@Doom_and_Gloom - marvellous mushrooms, can you tell me which kit you got please as I'd like to try my hand at growing some too.

Three NSDs so far for me as I'm feeling far too lazy to stir off the sofa and so am pretending to myself that using up what I've got in is virtuous and good for me not boring at all!

Blackcats

OBT very sorry to hear of your loss.  Take care of yourself and your family at this difficult time.

I've been doing very well with olio and I need to see this impact on monthly grocery spends.
yesterday I got raspberries, double cream (what a lovely combination), shortcrust pastry, broccoli, 3 packets of ham, cheese, bagels, courgettes, new potatoes and mushrooms.  We had a lovely brunch today of ham and egg bagels - yummy.  

Have adjusted my meal plan to include ham and mushroom omelette with new potatoes and courgette carbonara.  I've got a day off tomorrow so will have cheese and marmite bagels with a pot of posh coffee before going out for a walk and picnic with, surprise surprise some ham sandwiches 🤣)

ELSIEPAC can I aim for maximum of £320 this month

spend so far £35 - balance £285

joedenise

A small spend to declare from the weekend of £9.95 so now spent just £14.99/£250 this week so far, leaving £235.01.  Will need to pick up a few bits from Sainsbugs when I go to the next town on Wednesday for my SW group but should again only be a small spend.  I think it really helped having the money put by for after my holiday for a big freezer/pantry stock up which was separate to the GC so I had my full budget available for this month and really hopeful that I can come in under budget as there just isn't room in the freezer to buy more stuff!

Bluegreen143

Re YNAB categories I have Food, Cleaning & Toiletries, Pets and Household misc (the latter for things like tin foil, lightbulbs, stamps, printer paper etc - any misc consumables which aren’t for eating or keeping us clean). 

When the kids were in nappies I tried out having a separate baby category but ended up just logging nappies as Household Misc. Because we mainly used cloth I wasn’t buying all that many disposables, and I breastfed and never ever bought special baby food or snacks (just fed them what we were having), so the Baby category just seemed too small to bother with. If I was full time using disposable nappies and buying formula and puree I’d have separated it out though to avoid inflating the Household Misc category too much.

I did have a category for baby/kids “stuff” (rather than consumables) eg whenever I bought slings, blackout blinds, the next car seat, cloth nappies, a new baby monitor when our hand me down one broke… - my youngest is 3 and they don’t need special “baby stuff” now so I no longer have that category.

Thanks for the cereal bar recipes (I was on holiday!), I’ll check them out.

thriftwizard

Declaring my weekend/weekly shop total of £132.61; more than usual, as I was actually away for the weekend & needed some supplies to take with me (since surgery, I need a very high-fibre & fermented-food diet to keep things relatively normal) and DD1, who is also Twin 1, held a little celebration for her birthday -we'll celebrate DS2, Twin 2, next weekend; they were actually born on different days, over midnight - so I left extra grocery funds for her. I'll be doing the monthly non-perishables run later, or tomorrow, too. Hoping like mad that the allotment & garden produce starts to ease the burden this month, although I am expecting the older chickens to go into the moult & stop laying (temporarily)  towards the end of July/middle of August.

Smoosh

Some additional spends over the weekend:

£17.20 on 4kg dog food.

18p on pineapple (YS from £1), 25p on cream (YS from £1.69) and 10p on pancakes (YS from 42p).

£78.87/£230.

Usual weekly shop to be done this evening. 

Suffolk_lass

I'm not a fan of the average food spend link at beginning of the thread. Both from the point of view of the interpretation of the data and its claims of provenance and accuracy but I do think we want to compare our own spending with that of others. So to that end I have just checked ONS and their most recent figures still do not go past March 2020 - pre-COVID. However, they also have an interactive spend explorer on their website at this link and I do think it is worth people looking at this. You can click on a category and it splits it out a bit.

They also have figures on deb, expenditure, and income & wealth at this link and these are based on the 2021 census figures. And a personal inflation calculator here